Dealing with spitting Chinese - Zhang Lijia

Zhang Lijia

China's top officials have asked their fellow citizens to behave when they travel and refrain from spitting and loud talking. Author Zhang Lijia puts spitting in a historical perspective, and believes bad habit decreased, and can disappear, she told BBC News.

Zhang Lijia:

Of course, there’s the force of habit. I actually much prefer my new neighbourhood of Wine God Village. The streets are full of life and energy; people are friendly. And it is authentic. Some of my neighbours have indeed brought their habits from their village where the social norms are looser. Another reason for their uncaring behaviour, I suppose, is that they feel that they are not accepted or respected by the locals. Beijing is not their city. So why should they care? 

Spitting is the most notorious among the uncivilized Chinese manners and has made its way into travel literature. In his Riding the Iron Rooster, travel writer Paul Theroux wrote about the Chinese: “Spat all the time. . . You expected them to propel it about five yards, like a Laramie stockman sitting over a fence. But no they never gave it any force. They seldom spat more than a few inches from where they stood. They did not spit out, they spit down." 

Overall, spitting has become much less a problem. As a former champion of spitting competitions, I used to spit a great deal. When I was a worker at a rocket factory, we used to have spitting competitions when we were bored. We would line up and see who could shot the furthest or hit a certain spot with force and accuracy. Theroux would have changed his lines if he had seen us! In those days, most parts of China were pretty dirty. So it didn’t really matter if you added some dark yellow bits here and there. But the changed living environment and the realization of its unpleasantness – especially the foreplay – have transformed me. If I can change, anyone can.

More at BBC News (from Zhang Lijia's website).

Zhang Lijia is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. When you need her at your meeting or conference, do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

+China Weekly Hangout
Rampant pollution is one of the reasons to explain Chinese spitting habits. At the China Weekly Hangout sustainability expert +Richard Brubaker explained in January where the pollution if coming from, and what can be done. Moderation by +Fons Tuinstra of the +China Speakers Bureau. Coming Thursday the China Weekly Hangout will discuss the changes in China's labor force, especially the blue collar workers with +Dee Lee (Inno), running since 2007 a workers' hotline at Inno in Guangzhou. Expected is also economist Heleen Mees from New York. Moderation by Fons Tuinstra, president of the China Speakers Bureau. Our first announcement is here,and you can register for the hangout here.

What is China doing right? - Jeremy Goldkorn

Jeremy Goldkoen

The indispensable Chinafile asked some of its authors to list what is going right in China, after many obvious stories about what is going wrong. Danwei-founder Jeremy Goldkorn submitted a pretty long list, and this is how it starts.

Jeremy Goldkorn:

I’ll answer this question with an off-the-cuff and very personal list. Some may say these points are not actually good things, or that China isn’t actually doing these things well, or that the outcomes will not be copacetic. One of the very negative things about China is that if you look deep enough into any feel-good story, you’ll find something wrong or rotten, but this is a list of positives, so I won’t qualify my point with an acknowledgement of the counter arguments. Here goes: 

- Continuing to lift millions and millions of people out of poverty (that’s the big one). 

- A culture of hard work, thrift, and diligence that emphasizes the importance of education. 

- The fapiao, a state-issued invoice system that is a work of genius which allows a massive more-or-less unregulated informal economy to thrive and still contribute taxes to the state. 

- Investing in Africa, seeing developing countries as potential markets rather than basket cases. 

- Dreaming big. 

- Infrastructure. 

- Increasingly professional emergency response systems for bird flu scares, earthquakes etc.

More in Chinafile.

Jeremy Goldkorn is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Every upside has its downsides, and especially in China those downsides can be massive. The successful economic development has led to a massive shortage of sustainable energy. In September 2012 the China Weekly Hangout discussed energy security  with +Merritt Cooke from the Wilson Center and +Richard Brubaker  of CEIBS. Moderation by +Fons Tuinstra of the +China Speakers Bureau 

This Thursday the China Weekly Hangout will discuss the changes in China's labor force, especially the blue collar workers with +Dee Lee (Inno) , running since 2007 a workers' hotline at Inno in Guangzhou. Expected is also economist Heleen Mees from New York. Moderation by +Fons Tuinstra, president of the China Speakers Bureau. Our first announcement is here,and you can register for the hangout here.

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Why China's growth model makes sense - Heleen Mees

Heleen Mees

Location makes a difference for successful industries, but government can help, argues NYU economist Heleen Mees against New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. In Post-Syndicate, she explains why China's growth model makes sense, and uses the trade explosion province of Yunnan as an illustration.

+Heleen Mees :

According to Mr Krugman, it is often merely an accident where an industry locates. Silicon Valley owes its existence in large part to two young men named Hewlett and Packard, who started a company out of their garage. New York is New York because of a river, which mainly serves tourist boats these days. But even though it is mostly chance that determines where a particular industry locates, it doesn’t mean that you can’t lend chance a helping hand. And that is exactly what the Chinese government is doing with its large-scale investments in infrastructure, and to a somewhat lesser extent with its investment in housing. 

Yunnan, one of the poorest provinces of China that is mostly known for its cuisine, saw international trade explode in the first quarter of 2013, rising by almost 50% compared to the previous year, while exports throughout China rose by a modest 13%. The most significant gains in Yunnan's trade came in the mechanical and electronic sectors, neatly fitting the new trade theory. It is hard to imagine that mountainous Yunnan, which is not located on the Chinese coastline but is bordering Tibet, Laos and Vietnam instead, would have experienced the same growth without the central governments’ years of investing in Yunnan’s infrastructure.

That is not to say that China’s growth model has no drawbacks. It obviously has. The smog in China’s metropolis is smothering large swaths of the population, even though the air pollution in Delhi is often worse. Food scandals are undermining consumer confidence. Environmentalists are raising alarm bells about the central government’s plan to build a series of hydropower dams in the Nu, China’s last free flowing river. The project may force tens of thousands of ethnic minorities in Yunnan to relocate. These are serious issues that the Chinese leadership needs to address. 

That being said, within the framework of the new trade theory, China’s investment-led growth model makes more sense than western economists give it credit for.

More in Post-Syndicate.

Heleen Mees is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

+Heleen Mees  is expected to join us next week at the China Weekly Hangout, as we discuss the changing labor force in China on Thursday 23 May, with Inno founder +Dee Lee (Inno), who runs since 2007 a workers' hotline from Guangzhou. You can read our announcement here, or register directly for our hangout here.  Can the growing environmental NIMBY protest stop China's ambitious nuclear power program? The China Weekly Hangout discussed that issue on November 22, 2012 with +Richard Brubaker and +Fons Tuinstra. You can get a full overview of our hangouts here. When you register at our Google page +China Weekly Hangout, you get regular updates on upcoming sessions.

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The marginalization of labor - Heleen Mees

Heleen Mees

China and India are not only adding potential consumers to the market, their integration in the global economy has added a large labor force, leading to the marginalization of labor, writes NYU economist Heleen Mees in Project Syndicate. 

+Heleen Mees :

The integration of China and India in the global market added more than 2.3 billion consumers and producers to the global economy. They entered as producers of core goods and services and as consumers of food and energy. 

The labor glut in China and India has put downward pressure on wages in the rest of the world as well because of international trade and the ever-looming threat of offshoring. Even if China’s labor supply eventually dries up, the rise of technologies may still displace large swaths of workers. 

Profits as a share of U.S. GDP have doubled since China’s entry to the WTO in 2001. The price of a barrel of oil has tripled. According to Chicago University’s Loukas Karabarbounis and Brent Neiman, companies’ share of private savings rose in aggregate by 20 percentage points between 1975 and 2007 across 51 countries, while labor’s share of GDP shrank by five percentage points in aggregate in countries where corporate savings rose. 

The marginalization of labor contributes to the shortfall of demand, which in turn accounts for weak business investment. In the 2000's a massive credit bubble kept consumer spending afloat, offering only temporary reprieve. Now the pressure is on governments to act as spender of last resort.

More in Project Syndicate.

Heleen Mees is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

The story of China going global is a huge story. The +China Weekly Hangout addressed on aspect, China's media conquering Africa, in its session on March 7, 2013, including veteran journalists +Eric Olander of the China Africa Project, and +Lara Farrar, previously working for both the China Daily and CNN. Moderation by +Fons Tuinstra, president of the +China Speakers Bureau.

 
Is China's internet back to 'normal'. That is the question the China Weekly Hangout will address on Thursday 25 April. In December we looking into the dreadful internet connections so many companies and individuals were suffering from, when even the VPN's came under attack. We hoped that would inprove after the power transfer to Xi Jinping and his crew would be completed. Has that happened, and how do people on the ground expect the internet will serve them? You can read our announcement here, or register directly at our event page for participation. Below our December 20, 2012 session with participation of +Sam Xu, +John R. Otto, +Gabriel Rüeck and +Fons Tuinstra; are the recent hiccups just tests? Has China a kill button for the internet and will it use it? Or will there be a two-class internet, one for corporate users, and one for home users?

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Relaxation hukou needed to boost economy - Heleen Mees

Heleen Mees

China's domestic visa system, the Hukou, is a drain on its economy and makes if very hard for the industry to switch from export and investment driven to a consumption economy, says economist Heleen Mees in the Globe&Mail.

The Globe&Mail:

“I think the relaxation of the hukou system around China is very important, and it’s very easy for China. It has a lot of benefits,” said Heleen Mees, a Dutch economist teaching at New York University who has studied the role of the high savings rate in China in the 2008 financial crisis. 

Along with fuelling consumption, she said, such a move could strengthen China’s service economy, moving the focus away from low-end, heavily polluting manufacturing for export. 

“The collapse of exports only reinforces the point that China will have to find its internal growth engine because they can’t rely on the U.S., they can’t rely on Europe,” she said.

More in the Global&Mail.

Heleen Mees is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

More on the political changes needed in China in the upcoming ten years in the China Weekly Hangout of November 1.

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How Ben Bernanke triggered off the Great Depression - Heleen Mees

Heleen Mees

Economist Heleen Mees is making her first inroads into the US media with her PhD, blaming Chinese savings as the basis for the current financial crisis. But they got help, explains Heleen Mees in CNBC, as Ben Bernanke, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, triggered of aggressive rate cuts from the early 2000s.

CNBC:

The study, which compared financial market responses to U.S., Chinese and German quarterly GDP from 2006 through 2009, shows that the Chinese have been saving more than half of their GDP during that time. Those savings were heavily skewed towards fixed income assets like government bonds and depressed interest rates worldwide from 2004 on. 

This allowed for interest rates around the world to fall, and sparked a boom in the U.S. housing market due to the availability of cheap money. 

The study also argues that Ben Bernanke, chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, set the world up for the Great Recession by providing the “intellectual backing for the aggressive rate cuts in the early 2000s.”

More in CNBC.

Heleen Mees is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

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Will the Chinese stop saving (that much)? - Heleen Mees

Heleen Mees (Photo credit: Dave Pinter)

Today economist Heleen Mees will defend her PdD at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam putting the blame of the financial crisis on China, for its high savings by households, companies and government. But why do Chinese saved that much and when will it stop, she asks in Voxeu.

Heleen Mees:

The fact that the conventional Keynesian saving model, which implies a long-run tendency for the savings rate to rise with income, may largely explain China’s household savings rate in the past three to five decades, is best understood against the background of China as an emerging economy. There is evidence from developed countries that when income growth slows, savings rates decline. Since the high household savings rate is in part prompted by precautionary savings motives, especially for old age, the successful implementation of credible retirement plans – as announced in The Twelfth Five-Year Plan (2011-2015) – may reduce the household savings rate. However, as many Chinese fear that their country will grow old before it grows rich, precautionary motives may continue to fuel household savings as a share of disposable income in the years to come.

The article is co-authored by Raman Ahmed.

More in Voxeu.

Heleen Mees is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

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China's savings, not banking products, caused the financial crisis - Heleen Mees

The first summaries of economist Heleen Mees' PhD in Dutch media caused already a little uproar this week. Not evil banking products, but China's high savings rate  are the base of the ongoing financial crisis, is the short story. The whole story is slightly more complicated. 

Heleen Mees:

Chapter 2 proves the central thesis of this thesis, namely that China’s boom caused the 2008 financial crisis and ensuing recession. It builds on the work by Taylor (2008), Obstfeld and Rogoff (2010), Bernanke (2005), Greenspan (2011) and Warnock and Warnock (2009). Its main  contribution is that it shows that the built-up of total debt securities, rather than foreign purchases of U.S. Treasuries, depressed 10-year Treasury yields from 2004 on. In addition, I show that the Fed, with its excessively loose monetary policy in the early 2000s, contributed to a large extent to the housing bubble and current debt overload of U.S. households.

That global drop in interest rates was caused by China's huge savings. China's savings were not high as a percentage of its total GDP, because that is comparable to other developing countries. But because of its size a huge amount of cheap capital was available, says Heleen Mees. Problematic mortgages in the US did not cause the financial crisis, since they were less than five percent of the total amount of mortgages between 2000 and 2006.

The increase wealth in China, and the capacity to save, is partly caused by the American spending habits, Heleen Mees added. She does not support the suggestion China had a deliberate policy of undermining US and European economies.

Heleen Mees' PdH "Changing Fortunes - How China's Boom Caused the Financial Crisis" will be available online next week.

Heleen Mees is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

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Is the prevailing economic doctrine right? - Heleen Mees

Heleen Mees

Just weeks ahead of defending her PhD on the question if China's boom caused the financial crisis, NYU associate professor Heleen Mees wonders in The Financial Times, if the prevailing economic doctrine needs a revision.

Heleen Mees:

The prevailing doctrine among economists is that fundamentals – that is economic growth expectations – rather than the cost of risk capital drive business investment. This belief is based on a single academic paper written by Olivier Blanchard (current chief economist of the IMF) and Larry Summers (Harvard professor and former Treasury secretary), that was published in 1993 in the prestigious Quarterly Journal of Economics. But if the findings in that article are incorrect or do no longer apply, the Fed may just as well be putting the cart before the horse with a third round of quantitative easing. In that case Bernanke would be wise, if he were to employ the printing presses following the FOMC’s September meeting, to buy stocks instead.

More in The Financial Times.

Heleen Mees is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

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Why do stock markets react on China figures they do not trust? - Heleen Mees

Heleen Mees

Despite severe doubts about the trustworthiness of China's growth figures, they still have a major impacts on stock markets. Economist Heleen Mees dived into the dilemma and explains in Project Syndicate why we should take them serious anyway. Heleen Mees:

Regardless, official Chinese economic data should not be discounted. Skeptics often cite the discrepancy between reported GDP growth and energy demand, specifically the contraction in electricity consumption. But, as Rachel Ziemba of Roubini Global Economics points out, these discrepancies fall well within the margin of error. Using historical data on electricity use, Ziemba shows that reported growth rates for 2009 are plausible, despite falling electricity production. 

In fact, less energy-intensive Chinese growth should be a welcome development. In 2011, per capita carbon emissions in China were similar to emissions in the European Union, even though per capita income in China, measured in purchasing-power-parity (PPP) terms, was roughly one-fourth of that in the EU... 

Skepticism about official Chinese data may help the West to assuage its unease about China’s rise, but it eventually will have to come to grips with economic reality. China’s official numbers may bend the truth, but they don’t lie.

More arguments in Project Syndicate.

Heleen Mees is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers request form

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Heleen Mees

"China's boom caused the financial crisis and ensuing economic recession." That is the central theme of the PhD economist, lawyer and publicist Heleen Mees hopes to receive in August. The China Speakers Bureau is happy to welcome Heleen Mees as their latest speaker.

Heleen Mees will start in September as Adjunct Associate Professor of Public Administration at NYU Wagner.

Mees is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy.

Heleen Mees is Assistant Professor in Economics at Tilburg University. Before joining Tilburg University, Mees was a researcher at the Erasmus School of Economics. Her research focuses on monetary policy and the macroeconomic consequences of the rise of China and other emerging economies.

Mees is currently working on a field experiment in China, as part of the behavioral economics program. Last year she did research on the prevalence of money illusion in China, holding a survey among more than 300 individuals in Beijing.

Heleen Mees is based in New York.

Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.